Category Archives: Differentiation

Canadian Sports Retailer Delivers Value with Hi-Tech, Not Low Price

“Brands may need to perform an even tougher trick: redefining their own definition of value to one that’s additive.  When not reduced to the question of price, value speaks directly to what benefits a product or service adds to a customer’s life.”    Maureen Morrison and Matthew Creamer in Advertising Age)

There’s more to value than just low price.

Canadian sports retailer Sport Chek believes that.  It’s going high-tech to create what it hopes will be a unique customer buying experience.

Photo: Sport Chek Facebook.

Photo: Sport Chek Facebook.

Sport Chek recently unveiled a technologically souped-up retail store in Toronto that will serve as a living retail laboratory to bring shopping innovation to all of its 163 stores.

Sport Check is leveraging a fundamental shopper insight to battle the “showrooming” phenomenon enabled by website retailing:

Online shopping is great except you can’t always see the product fully, and it’s difficult to experience the product completely because you can’t touch and feel the item.

So, it’s bringing a 360-degree integrated marketing experience to Canadian sporting goods buyers.  It’s convergence, the best of all worlds - see it, touch it, try it, customize it, order it, take it home - all in the same place. Continue reading

CA Winery Blends Packaging & Consumer Insights To Create New Products

Photo: Stranger & Stranger.

Packaging is often an under-appreciated and under-utilized marketing asset.

I’m not talking about the marketing joke with the basic theme that every new brand manager wants to change the label design.  Rather, let’s explore how packaging (both structure and design) can become part of the actual concept and go-to-market strategy.

A California winery has just launched a new range of wines, that in my view, addresses a fundamental issue with buying wine:  more often than not, consumers lack basic wine knowledge and are thus intimidated, confused and uncomfortable buying wine.  But it’s not their fault.  It’s the fault of the wine industry.  I speak as a former wine importer and distributor who used packaging to address this hurdle. Continue reading

American Express Treats “Service” as a Marketing Differentiator

I thought about the opportunity of capitalizing on every interaction and moving away from being a cost of doing business to being an investment in building relationships.

Jim Bush – Executive Vice President of World Service – American Express

Let’s give Jim Bush a “marketer of the day” award for his mindset on how to leverage the service function to impact the bottom line – via customer engagement and not simple transaction management.

As he declared in a recent Fortune interview:  “We let the customer determine how much time they want to engage. That engagement drives value. We serve customers, not transactions.”

Even if you don’t work in service, adopt an “outside:in” perspective and always consider what you can do to positively impact customers.  It may come as a surprise that the AMEX service team is focused on and considers what it does a company competitive advantage. Continue reading

Penney Pushes Change. What Can You Take Away?

Source: J.C. Penney

J.C. Penney’s new CEO, former Apple executive Ron Johnson, boldly proclaimed the retailer’s plan to become “America’s favorite store” in a major presentation to investors yesterday.

I’m not a student of J.C. Penney and who knows if this new strategy will lead to profitable growth.  Retail is TOUGH.  But, after reading the initial news report, and then watching Johnson’s presentation, a few points really stood out to me: Continue reading